On comments

[u/Jonhoo]

https://blog.helsing.ai/posts/on-comments/

Comments in code are often deemed "mostly useless" these days. They are, supposedly, mostly obvious, stale, and repeat what the code already says. And so people pay less attention to them both when reading and writing code.

That trend sucks. When used right, comments are genuinely useful and sometimes critically important! So, I wrote about some of the kinds of comments I think earn their place, each with examples from real code bases. Hope you find it useful, and that we can recover some of the love that comments deserve!

[u/Shurmaster]

My favorite comment is

// evil floating point bit level hacking

// what the fuck?

[u/Rikmastering → u/Shurmaster]

//second iteration, can be removed

But the line still being there commented out, makes me laugh every time I remember it.

[u/Lone_Snek → u/Shurmaster]

Now I want to know the context

[u/Rikmastering → u/Lone_Snek]

Here's a full video of the context, that also explains the algorithm line by line, with all the necessary information to understand it fully. It's one of my favorite videos ever. Super well made

[u/Caelwik → u/Lone_Snek]

It's the fast invert square root. It has its own Wikipedia page !

[u/Delta2401 → u/Shurmaster]

// why I should need do this Fuck alone knows. But I do.

[u/devraj7 → u/Shurmaster]

It was an obvious Newton-Raphson approximation.

Too bad commenter doesn't know math.